baxy77bax has asked for the
wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

hi,

well after a long perlmonks, cpan and google searching, for a suitable module , script and a method. i came up with nothing, nada, zero, 0. what am i looking for is the way to create a high quality line, bar chart in PS, pdf, eps, and png format that looks something like this : mixed chart

the really cool thing that looks it can do most of the things i need is gnuplot module but to get this module working on windows, that is just to pipe it to gnuplot is a miracle (i keep getting tons of errors like : Invalid Parameter - 90,Error in tempdir() using \tmp\XXXXXXXXXX: Parent directory (\tmp) does not exist at C:/Perl/site/lib/Chart/Gnuplot.pm line 1330, .... and many more -- so i just gave up on it, if i can't make it work in a reasonable time i can't expect an average joe to sit at his computer for days trying to make something work, that he is going to use couple of times a year).

There's also R, which can produce a number
of nifty diagrams — see Graphical procedures
for an introduction (not exhaustive, as much functionality
comes via individual packages / object types). Its primary
focus is on statistics, but it provides a number of rather generic
plotting facilities which may be used for many other purposes as well. It
supports various output formats (Device drivers),
allows for custom arrangement of multiple figures, has low-level drawing commands, etc.

Statistics::R is a Perl wrapper around the R interpreter (though
I'm not sure how well it works under Windows...).

It might take a bit of work, but look at Goo::Canvas Graphing demo. The Goo modules comes pre-built and works fine on Windows with Camelbox Perl , which installs easily from my limited experience on Vista Basic. Goo is based on Cairo ( a postscript style drawing language, which you might use on it's own ) and Goo extends it to persistent items, transparencies, rotated text, etc.